If you follow my articles, you may have seen my previous writing called Chronic Pain - Alternatives to Narcotic Medications, that talks about the success of psychotropic drugs to relieve chronic pain. In that article, I explain that a pain nerve impulse, is really just like any other nerve impulse, for instance, sound, smell, heat, or pressure. It’s not until the impulse reaches your brain, is processed and becomes a “thought”, that it really manifests itself as pain. In other words, it’s like an electrical current traveling up a wire and is heading towards a random switch that automatically switches the power between a red light bulb and a green light bulb.

Until the current hits the switch, and is diverted to one bulb or the other, it’s just a current. The current doesn’t care where it’s going, and it doesn’t know whether it’s going to make the red or the green light bulb shine. In the same way, the nerve impulse is just an impulse. Until your brain finally sorts it out, and you have the thought of pain, it’s not pain! Are you with me In the same way, placebo medications are thought to have a similar effect on pain control. Every ER physician that has been around for a while knows that people with minor ailments can often receive a shot of old plain salt water, (of course you don’t tell the patient its saline), and they’ll later report significant improvement or even miraculous recovery.

Placebo medications have been used in clinical trials since clinical trial and the scientific method began. Recently however, a German team of researchers tested “what they said” was a pain relieving lidocaine cream, along with a placebo cream. Basically, they told the patients they were going to burn their forearms and then test the effectiveness of the two creams. What they really did, was create a placebo cream, and then a fake lidocaine cream, and make the patients believe that the “fake lidocaine cream” was working. They did this by turning down the heat level at the fake lidocaine test site. At the same time they maximized the heat level of the “placebo cream” test site, so the patients felt more pain with the known placebo.

Then, after the patients were convinced that the “fake lidocaine cream” was genuine medicine, they were hooked up to MRI to look at brain activity during a new burning session with the two creams! In each case the fake lidocaine cream had a much more profound effect of pain relief when compared to the placebo, as exhibited by both patient response, and by MRI imaging of brain activity. It is thought that endorphins, the brain’s natural opiate (as they call it), blocks the neural pathway that manifests pain in the brain. I’m still waiting for them to come up with an endorphin pill for me to take when I go to the gym.

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